As for the final duel, Kubrick milks it for all the tension he can: showing the guns being carefully loaded, observing the pre-duel coin-toss, watching the men take their places 10 paces apart, letting the referee’s instructions echo through the cavernous space, all while menacing strings and kettle drums of the score groan and pound in a steady rhythm. But there’s absurdity here, too, in the constantly cooing pigeons, in the accidental discharge of Lord Bullingdon’s gun and in the way Barry bravely and nobly faces his death only to be shot in the leg, leading to a lot of undignified moaning. You mentioned earlier the “all are equal now” epilogue, and sure enough there are clues throughout Barry Lyndon that this era, like this main character, wasn’t nearly as special, noble or otherwise impressive as the people within it seemed to believe.

EH: The duels are indeed one of the primary vehicles for Kubrick’s satire of the “noble” class and their silly, artificial rules for living. As you say, the film opens with a duel, which immediately establishes the absurdity of staking one’s life over minor slights of “honor,” so that a life is erased in mere seconds. This absurdity calls into question the whole concept of honor as it’s understood by the society depicted in this film—duels as presented by Kubrick are not so much showcases for honor and nobility but evidence of fragile egos forced by convention to respond to even the slightest of imagined insults. Wojciech Has’ The Saragossa Manuscript, released 10 years earlier, similarly skewers the aristocratic class for its eagerness to waste lives in petty duels: the main character remembers that his father once fought 10 duels in a single day in order to avoid an argument, a hilarious formulation that wouldn’t be at all out of place in Barry Lyndon.

The interesting thing about Kubrick’s approach to duels is that, as absurd and wasteful as he makes them seem, he doesn’t eliminate the genuine tension and emotion of these showdowns, at least in the two duels in which Barry takes part. When Barry faces Captain Quin, Kubrick emphasizes the fear and hesitance of the duelists, who quiver and tremble, barely disguising their terror at facing death. The romanticized ideal of dueling—stoic nobleman bravely staking their lives to maintain their honor—is quite different from the way Kubrick presents dueling, as this pointless face-off between shaky-handed men who stare at one another in abject horror. Quin’s wide-eyed expression is both poignant and comical—but tips more towards the latter in light of the eventual revelation that he knew the duel was a farce all along, so in hindsight we realize he was scared not of death but of being shot with a blank.

In Barry’s second duel, Kubrick draws out the preparation for the showdown with such portentousness that the tension becomes nearly unbearable. The martial strings drone in the background, blending with the cooing of the birds and the papery rustle of wings as pigeons flutter around the barn. The scene is solemn, even ritualistic, with thin slit windows and crosses carved into the stone walls behind the duelists, letting in slivers of bluish light that make the scene seem holy and eerie, a place of worship rather than a place of idiotic death and maiming. The long shots of the barn with the two men setting up to shoot each other are especially breathtaking, finding a weird kind of beauty in this slow, mechanical ritual. The aesthetic gloss of this scene, however, only makes it all the more startling when the duel itself quickly descends into comedy. The arcane rules for this particular duel, where the men take turns shooting each other, with chance determining who shoots first, make it especially silly, and then Lord Bullingdon’s accidental firing of his gun into the ground—and his terrified, little-boy-in-trouble expression afterwards—only exacerbate the lunatic surrealism of this practice.

JB: By the time Barry enters into that final duel, he’s seemingly lost everything. We’ve seen him shunned from his old social circle. We’ve watched his son die. And then, in the duel with his stepson, Barry is shot by Lord Bullingdon even after he spares his stepson by intentionally firing into the ground. Barry’s sacrificed shot seems less a matter of etiquette (you wasted a shot, so I will) and more like an olive branch, an admission of guilt, an act of atonement. Barry knows that he has treated his stepson poorly, so he understands Lord Bullingdon’s rage, much like Captain Quin must have understood Barry’s rage all those years ago. There’s a sense when Barry fires his shot into the ground that he hopes Lord Bullingdon will shoot him dead and end his misery, but when Lord Bullingdon announces that he has not received “satisfaction” there’s a subtle expression of surprise that flashes across Barry’s face, as if the last thing he imagined is that Lord Bullingdon would continue with the duel after Barry spared him.

Of course, Barry’s ultimate fate in the duel is the worst thing he can imagine. He isn’t spared. He isn’t killed. He’s maimed, blasted in the leg. In the next scene, the doctor examines Barry’s leg and says he’ll have to amputate. “Lose the leg? What for?” Barry asks. “The simple answer to that is ’to save your life,’” the doctor replies. This, it turns out, is the low point for Barry. Suddenly it registers for him that there’s no coming back from this duel, the way he’d reinvented himself all those years ago. He’ll forever be crippled, and he’ll forever have a physical reminder of his sins. And as Barry comes to this realization, weeping in bed, a church bell tolls in the background.

The next scene finds Lord Bullingdon heading to the Lyndon estate by carriage, hatching a plan by which to get Barry’s mother out of the house before he steps foot through the door. While Lord Bullingdon schemes, the same priest who married Barry and Lady Lyndon can’t suppress a smile, realizing in that moment that Barry has been cast out by a man who shows signs of being as conniving as he was. Kubrick seems to be reminding us that when one selfish asshole steps out of the spotlight, another one comes along to take his place.

EH: That sense of progression is important because Barry Lyndon is, in the end, as much about society as a whole as it is about the one man who gives the film its title. All of this maneuvering for wealth and prestige doesn’t actually make anyone happy, neither the victors nor the losers like Barry. In the last scene of the film, Lady Lyndon and her son somberly shuffle through piles of paper for Lady Lyndon to sign, the endless bills and paperwork associated with their life of privilege and success. This scene intentionally mirrors the earlier one in which Lady Lyndon and Barry joylessly went through these same paper rituals: there’s no pleasure, no contentment, in the management of the massive wealth for which these people fight so tirelessly.

Instead, there’s only loss and sadness. Kubrick alternates closeups of Lady Lyndon and her son in the final moments of the film, focusing on the moment when she has to sign for the annuity paid to Barry to keep him away from the family. Lady Lyndon seems lost in thought, and her red-rimmed eyes, used to crying, well up a bit. But there’s also the very slightest of smiles dancing briefly at the corners of her mouth, as though she’s remembering whatever small happy moments the couple might have had together, or the son they’d so loved. Those fleeting moments of pleasure are ultimately lost in the struggle to live, not for the moment, not for the sake of enjoying life, but for accumulating reputation and wealth for posterity. Barry Lyndon demonstrates the folly of such an attitude, and it does so by completely embodying it in Barry, an empty vessel filled almost entirely with base urges and stupidity. Kubrick harshly satirizes this man and the grabby approach to life he represents, but more remarkably he also makes us feel for Barry, lamenting the waste of time and life that disappear into the vacuum of Barry’s ambition. That’s why the final moments of the film are so devastating, so sad, embodying in the exchange of glances between Lady Lyndon and her son a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions and lost opportunities.

JB: It really does feel like a lifetime. The coupling of the narration and the deliberate pace give Barry Lyndon a decidedly novel-esque feel, as if we’re paging through Barry’s life in Thackeray’s original. Like so much of Kubrick’s work, the atmosphere of the whole is more telling than any specific gesture, line or scene. Barry Lyndon is an experience more than a plot, wrapping us up in its colorful panoramas and moody candlelit closeups to create a precise sense of time and space. If it’s best remembered for the way it looks, perhaps that’s fitting, given that it’s about a man who at his height only appears remarkable. But clearly there is more to Barry Lyndon than lush visuals. It’s a film with character about a man who lacks it.

Nevertheless, the praise for the film’s visual splendor is hardly misplaced. Kubrick gives us a bland character in a movie dominated by visuals that are anything but. To quote Scorsese again, Barry Lyndon really is “one exquisitely beautiful image after another,” and it’s the consistency of those breathtaking compositions that gives this deliberately methodical film its undeniable momentum. It’s not a film one is drawn to so much as a film one can’t break away from. For all of Barry Lyndon’s cool detachment, the obvious care of Kubrick’s filmmaking gives it a strange warmth.

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I disagree about the lack of an iconic scene. When Barry canes Bullingdon after being goaded in front of those he most wants to impress, the wretchedness of the brute revealed is written on the face of every person present. This more than anything marks his fall, and the cause is that he has allowed the ugliness of his true nature to show. Bullingdon has his revenge when Barry, for once, does the noble thing and fires into the ground. I believe this film to be a masterpiece, and easily my favorite of Kubrick's films (aside from Strangelove)

Posted by Josh Carroll on 2017-09-24 13:54:27

My god, what a load of superficial twaddle. What's next, an immersive introspection of the model-rific, USA channel? Is this all you've learnt in that second rate film school (polytechnic?) you've attended. #zzzz

Posted by Horatio Nelson on 2013-08-10 04:56:01

Adam: I just now noticed your lengthy comment. Thank you! I think the closeness you feel to the characters--the fact that you care so deeply about their fates--comes from the repeat viewings. Which is to say that I think Ebert is right, that it's a distant movie, and that you're right, too, that it's a deeply emotional one. This is one of those movies that changes based on one's angle of approach.
Clarence: Thanks for reading! Grateful.Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2012-01-02 16:30:31

I just re-watched this film on Sundance Channel. Your discussion was very useful in deepening my appreciation of this masterpiece. Thanks for writing it!Posted by Anonymous on 2012-01-01 02:11:25

Whenever I sit down and watch Barry Lyndon, I just don't want it to end. I want to stay in that world forever. Even though the characters are selfish and introverted in that 2-dimensional, Kubrickian way, I already feel like I've gotten to know them, and I'm strangely drawn to them. Kubrick is a master of understatement: character and plot do not come first in any of his best movies, and yet we already feel like we've gotten a good grasp on his characters and his plots. I'm in agreement with David in that I would absolutely consider this my favorite Kubrick film.
But I think I'm also in a thin minority in that I think this is a very emotional film, too. As happy as I am to see that Ebert attempted to do pay tribute to Barry Lyndon in that Great Movies piece of his, I don't necessarily believe he did much justice to the movie. Ebert argues that Barry Lyndon is "emotionally distant", but I couldn't disagree more. I do think Ebert is on to something when he suggests that the movie "defies us to care", since Michael Hordern, as you guys have mentioned here, makes a ton of snarky remarks in his narration. The Narrator of this movie seems to constantly be reminding the audience that Redmond Barry is not a man of any real significance. But you know, by the end of the movie, I always find myself disagreeing with the Narrator, since I do think Barry is at the very least a character whom the audience can identify without, despite his neverending shortcomings.
The first I saw the movie, I found myself rooting for Barry as he climbs to success, only to be disappointed when he loses it all at the end. I interpreted Lord Bullingdon as the villain of the film and grew frustrated when he prevailed in that final duel. But when I watched the movie again, I realized that all of this was Kubrick's intent. We do have every reason to be siding with Barry, at least during the first half of the movie; there's something undeniably fascinating about watching "Irish trash" winning battles and duels and climbing to the tob of British nobility. But then in the 2nd half of the movie Barry, as Ed mentions, "becomes the villain of his own story," with his infidelity, his greediness, his use of harsh corporal punishment as a defense mechanism against Bullingdon. It wasn't until repeated viewings when I realized I was identifying a lot more with Bullingdon; I could feel his anger at watching an anonymous man mistreat him, replace his father and swindle his mother into a loveless marriage.
I noticed up above that Hammer included a link from the Kubrick Tripod website. The guy who runs that site, tieman64, has written a review of Barry Lyndion (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072684/reviews?start=14) in which he suggests that the loss of Barry's leg at the end of the movie is "punishment" for his sudden attempt to do the decent thing for once, and give Bullingdon a chance. By letting Bullingdon have another turn in the duel, Barry is basically defying the conventions of the Hollywood period piece, refusing to go down as the asshole he's been for the entire 2nd half of the movie. And instead of getting a reward for that, the movie's universe punishes him. He loses his leg. This is the whole tragedy of the movie, really: as charming as Barry is, he commits so many misdeeds during the course of the film that by the end, it's too late for an apology. That frozen shot of him entering the carriage with his mother at the end is just plain creepy; it's like Kubrick is turning Barry into Dorian Gray or something, frozen forever in his own cinematic canvas.
Thing is, I love the way Kubrick tells this story (even though I have yet to read the Thackeray novel--need to do that soon, I guess) and how gracefully the characters are portrayed. Leon Vitali really, REALLY makes you feel Bullingdon's rage. Marissa Berenson is haunting, to say the least. When Godfrey Quigley delivers Captain Grogan's dying words ("Kiss me, me lad, for we'll never meet again"), I just want to weep. Same with that scene with Patrick Magee as the Chevalier; the look on his face when he realizes that Barry is one of his fellow Irishman is absolutely crushing. And Ryan O'Neal... man, it's too bad his career after this wasn't promising, because this was the role of a lifetime. Jason's right: he IS "memorably forgettable" in this, but that's what makes his portrayal of Barry so thought-provoking. You can't take your eyes off of him. I can only think of a few other actors who have pulled off such a portrayal in an epic so well: Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago, Orlando Bloom in Kingdom of Heaven and, yeah, Cruise in EWS.
It's a sad movie, but I think there's a glimmer of hope at the conclusion, when the Epilogue reads that the characters are "all equal now". At the end of the day, no matter who lost their son, or their leg, or their fortunes, husbands or wives, everybody's equal now. Money doesn't matter anymore--it simply doesn't matter after death. To me, that actually makes the ending kind of optimistic. And that's why I long for some brave director to come along and make another bold, passionate period piece like this film, even though movies Barry Lyndon are usually expensive and--admittedly--acquired tastes. It's makes me unhappy to consider that Hollywood will probably never want to distribute a movie like this ever again.Posted by Adam Zanzie on 2011-11-02 01:08:42

Thanks, all, for the comments. A few replies ...
David: "First of all, the third person narration is a Kubrick invention Thackeray has Barry tell his own story. This in and of itself underscores Kubrick's aim — to keep the spectator at a distance."
Certainly successful! One of the things about the narration that I find so fascinating is that on one hand it seems almost like an intentional narration cliche (stereotypical narration clicked up to 11 so that even the narrator knows he's the narrator; if you understand my meaning) and yet on the other hand the narration isn't quite like any other narration I've encountered (see previous parenthetical).
Hammer: That satisfaction clip is, um, something. Thanks for sharing!
Bruce: Terrific points both! Truly, the switch to hand-held escaped me, which we can attribute to two things: 1) I'm an idiot; 2) It works--that is the effect is what sticks, rather than drawing too much attention to the technique itself.
David again: "...speaks for itself." If for no other reason than it's hard to put into words. Thanks for the link!Posted by Jason Bellamy on 2011-10-30 12:28:20

Most astute in mentioning that moment Mr. Reid. The handheld camera clearly embodies the fact that Bullington's assult on Barry is an attack on social manners which deems duels to be the only proper form.
As to Kubrick's use of music, here's something I came acorss on You Tube that speaks for itself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSBRrvzTpGw&feature=player_embeddedPosted by David Ehrenstein on 2011-10-26 13:11:41

The "signature moment" of Barry Lyndon exists, but at least so far as homages are concerned it's actually auditory. I remember quite a few movies tipping their hat to the film less in imagery than in playing the Handel or Schubert (specifically, the Trio) cues Kubrick selected.
I'm surprised in your exchange about Barry's assault on Bullingdon you don't mention the shocking shift to handheld camera. After those stately zooms it's screamingly disruptive, as if all the preceding, meticulously posed compositions had been the paintings the film's critics alleged and Kubrick took the opportunity to mischievously kick the frame from the wall, and it skittered and bounced on the hardwood trailing deep scratches as it went. It's one of my favorite moments in any film, not least because Kubrick is so patient in getting there.Posted by Anonymous on 2011-10-26 03:33:03

Thanks for the links, Hammer.
Baudrillard nails it.Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2011-10-23 02:30:53

Gotta disagree with one point by you guys. As this video shows, the film is quite hip with the pop culture crowd:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vo02sfaneQ&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL :)
Some philosophical readings of the film which I find provocative:
http://kubrickfilms.tripod.com/id53.html
Brilliant, brilliant flick. One of cinema's finest. Oh, those aching images.Posted by Hammer on 2011-10-22 20:38:03

Very nice discussion of what has become my very favorite Kubrick.
First of all, the thrid person narration is a Kubrick invention Thackeray has Barry tell his own story. This in and of itself underscores Kubrick's aim--to keep the spectator at a distance.
The evennness of tone is quite important in that it highlights the oments of violence in the film. No not the wars (which are seen as ceremonial porcessions) but the duels. The film is all about duels.
Also before proceedding any further I must mention what the late Jonathan Benair( a much-missed L.A. film esthete) said of Barry Lyndon: "it's Kubrick's most Jewish film. Rise above your station and God will strick you down and cut off your leg!"
As Barry, Ryan O'Neal was chosen because (thanks to the recently deceased Sue Mengers) he was one of Hollywood's biggest male stars at the time AND because Kubrick's daughter ( who as a tot asked for a "Busbbaby" in 2001:A Space Odyssey</i) had adored him in What's Up Doc?
Kubrick worked with a number of teriffic--well-nigh overwhelming--actors in the first part of his career: Sterling Hayden in The Killing, Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory and Spatacus James Mason, Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers in Lolita (my second favorite Kurick) ans Sellers again along with George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden (again)Keenan Wynn, Peter Bull and Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.
2001: Space Odyssey was a major paradigm shift in that the ost important performance was given by the voice of the computer HAL (Douglas Rain). The would -be leads--Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood--were bit players to a piece of machinery.
Or as Noel Coward once quipped "Keir Dullea gone tomorrow."
Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, Vincent d'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket Jaaaaack in The Shining and Leon Vitali in this one gave performances keyed to a single expression only--malevolence.
Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon and that Mapother character in Eyes Wide Shut both play schmucks.
Typecasting, needless to say.
Marisa Berenson (who recently vouchsafed that Helmut Berge was the love of her life--YIKES) is used principally as a piece of furniture (Visconti and Bob Fosse gave her a lot more to do in Death in Venice and Cabaret, and she really shines in I Am Love) But she does have the finale, and one of the most shockingscenes in the history of the cinema.
Why is it so shiocking? Because it shows the most obscene act possible under capitalism
WRITING THE CHECKS!!!!Posted by David Ehrenstein on 2011-10-21 20:34:27